Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [105]
The receptionist’s voice roused Brandon from his reverie. “Dr. Stryker will see you now,” she said.
Larry Stryker sat at a large rosewood desk. Behind him was a matching wall of built-in bookshelves laden with books. A carefully folded copy of the Wall Street Journal lay in solitary splendor on an expanse of otherwise pristine polished wood. If a computer lurked somewhere in his office, it wasn’t readily visible.
Larry may have been dressed to the nines, but Brandon was startled to see how much he had aged since their last encounter at the Man and Woman of the Year event two years earlier. Stryker no longer sported a full shock of white hair. It was much thinner now. His once strong facial features seemed blurred and blunted in a way that made Brandon suspect an overreliance on drugs or booze. When he stood up to greet his visitor, he seemed thinner as well.
Them’s the breaks, Brandon thought. He’s not that much older than I am, but he’s probably thinking I look older, too.
“Good to see you again, Brandon,” Stryker said heartily. “To what do I owe this honor? How’s the family? We hear about Diana’s success often.”
But not about mine, Brandon thought. Larry Stryker may not have spoken the barb aloud, but Brandon Walker heard it loud and clear.
“Yes,” he replied, maintaining Larry’s phony hail-fellow-well-met tone. “She’s doing great, isn’t she? And everybody else is fine as well.”
“Good, good. Have a seat,” Stryker continued. “And your daughter? Beautiful girl. What’s her name again?”
“Lani.”
“Wasn’t she going to work with us one of these summers?”
“That’s what her mother had in mind,” Brandon said. “Turns out Lani made other plans.”
“Kids do that, don’t they,” Stryker agreed amiably. “Now to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”
Taking his time, Brandon opened his wallet and extracted one of his TLC business cards. “Actually,” he said, handing the card across the desk, “I’m working a case.”
“A case?” Stryker repeated. “Really? I was under the impression you’d retired. What are you, some kind of private investigator?”
“You might call it that,” Brandon agreed. “I’ve followed your footsteps into the world of nonprofits.”
“A nonprofit private eye?” Stryker asked. He pulled on a pair of reading glasses and examined the card closely. His hands were liberally sprinkled with liver spots. Brandon stole a look at the backs of his own hands. He had a few of those spots, too, but not nearly as many.
“So TLC stands for The Last Chance,” Stryker observed. “What does that mean?”
Brandon nodded. “We’re a voluntary consortium that investigates cold cases—ones law enforcement agencies no longer have the time or resources to handle. Usually we’re called in by grieving relatives who are looking for closure. The case I’m dealing with now is an unsolved homicide that happened out on the reservation more than thirty years ago. The victim was a teenager named Roseanne Orozco. I believe she was a patient at the hospital at Sells shortly before her death. I wondered if you might remember anything about her.”
There was only the smallest of pauses before Lawrence Stryker answered—a pause that wasn’t long enough to encompass more than thirty years of remembering and one punctuated by the involuntary bobbing of Stryker’s prominent Adam’s apple.
“No,” he said, with a frown meant to pass as concentration. “I don’t recall anyone by that name.”
In that one electric moment, all of Brandon’s old hunting instincts came into play. Larry Stryker was lying. The man knew exactly who Roseanne Orozco was, but, for whatever reason, he didn’t want to admit it. Once a lie surfaces in an interrogation, it’s time to push for more information. Even so, a yellow caution light began blinking at the back of Brandon’s head. He was little more than a private citizen, but he was investigating a very real murder—one in which Larry Stryker